On Thursday evening, amid swirling speculation about the Brown University gunman, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins took to social media, highlighting the uncertainty and guiding the public to her network’s 9pm newscast.
While the network is hardly a flawless news source, her words seemed accurate for a lot of people. It remains one of the organizations where you can find reality-based and generally dependable reporting – notably during breaking news situations like the one unfolding near a New Hampshire storage facility.
A Vulnerable Position Amid a Corporate Struggle
But the news network, now middle-aged, finds itself in a vulnerable state as two giant media corporations battle over ownership of its corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery.
Whatever the outcome, the destiny of CNN has turned into a high-risk game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.
“This represents another instance of the profound systemic issues with origins in many years of regulatory actions,” said Victor Pickard, writer of “Democracy Without Journalism?” and a media policy professor at the Penn.
The conjecture about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – could it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a more important point.
“It gets presented as a financial tale with key players as the main characters, but there is very little discussion of the common good,” Pickard said.
The Additional Layer: The Former President
The network's predicament is made more complex by Donald Trump’s opinions about a network he has consistently labeled as perhaps his main “fake news” adversary.
Recall the shouts of “CNN sucks!” at the president’s rallies, his team's disciplinary revocation of reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials, or his sparring with Collins in official meetings.
Trump now asserts that the network requires new ownership. You can read that as ownership that will protect him from journalistic oversight. That is part of why he appears to support Paramount Skydance, which has made a unsolicited offer.
Trump has reason to favor that suitor more. For one thing, it is led by David Ellison, son of the ally of Trump Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people.
The company, owner of CBS News, also recently placed the conservative Bari Weiss, noted for her “anti-woke” beliefs, as the lead editor of that venerable news network.
A Future of More Uncertainty
Notably, if Netflix is successful, CNN and other cable outlets would first be spun off into a independent unit. Such a move could be a relief to many at the network, but it’s far from a safe harbor. That setup could position CNN for another sale. There is no finish line.
If you ask Timothy Wu, much of this is against the law, anyway. The influential voice of big tech’s dominance wrote recently that competition laws should block both deals.
“Both acquisition attempts would be harmful to the country, and both should be contested by anti-trust authorities,” Wu recently wrote.
The Core Problem and a Path Forward
No matter the outcome with this particular battle, the bigger problem endures.
“What we have now is a highly anti-democratic system, but we shouldn’t give in to a sense of powerlessness,” Pickard said. Policy decisions – from the 1930s and 1940s – helped to foster this hyper-commercialized monster, and revised policy decisions can fix it.
Can reform occur in an era where the Federal Communications Commission chair will not confirm that the agency is independent? Change is a distant prospect now, but that doesn’t mean it will not happen in the future.
Measures that bolster independent news organizations, aid local journalism, fund public media, and prevent the concentration of media power in very few hands are achievable – they are necessary for a healthy democracy.
In the world of media ownership, larger is not superior. And news organizations such as CNN shouldn’t be pieces in the newest merger game.